I just came across this post at the Social Media Explorer where Jason Falls puts his spin on the new Lifestreaming functionality coming to MyBlogLog very soon. I wrote about this as well recently. It appears that Jason struck a nerve when he stated “Is Yahoo just ripping off established aggregators like Profilactic?”. It just so happened that Eric Marcoullier (one of the Co-Founders of MyBlogLog who is no longer there) made his way to the site and left 2 comments providing us with some history behind the “New With Me” functionality which is soon to be released.
Quote from Eric:
We hade the first version of New With Me circulating in private beta in late April of 2007. We were not allowed to launch because it was apparently in conflict with another project in development elsewhere in the organization that was due to launch a year later. One of many reasons I left.
This is interesting on two levels. The first being that Eric saw Lifestreaming as being an innovative new concept and could have positioned MyBlogLog as a frontrunner in the service game. Secondly, what could have been the Yahoo project in development that was holding this back, and is it still coming or has it been scrapped? Very interesting things to ponder.
I do feel for Eric as the ordeal must have made matters incredibly frustrating for him after Yahoo’s purchase, and you can feel it from his comments. It’s situations like this that can really take the wind out of your sails. I wonder if matters were made worse if after leaving he had to sign a non-compete clause not allowing him to work on a Lifestreaming venture of his own. That’s assuming he even wanted to at that point. I can only speculate.
Shortly after Eric’s comment we see another one posted by Todd Sampson who was also a Co-Founder of MyBlogLog and still with the company.
Quote from Todd:
In the end, every site is going to have a user’s life-stream available as a tool to help make the user’s experience better. What a site ultimately does with the life-stream is what will matter.
That is oh so true and he hit the nail with that one. We have seen so many services that are now able to aggregate the data, slice it, dice it and so forth. The next step in the evolution of Lifestreaming will be to see some killer algorithms written do something meaningful with all this data that’s being provided.
Todd also has a post titled “Distributed Social Networks have Tipped“. I agree in that the launch of all the recent efforts to free our data including those by OpenSocial, Data Portability, DiSo, and Google’s Social Graph, we’re hopefully gonna see more innovation soon.
I’m just glad that MyBlogLog is finally moving forward with something they’ve had baking for over a year. Funny thing is it’s usually the other way around with ambitious development efforts taking too long to market and angering the biz folk. Here you had some innovative code being forced to stay on the development server and not getting to see the light of day for almost a year. An ugly form of irony if you’re in the dotcom field.
Good post. Thanks for noticing and for pointing folks my way. It certainly is a shame they had to sit on this innovation. It’s yet another sign of Yahoo’s ineptitude in the social media space to date. Hopefully this, among other things, gets them out of their funk. A better Yahoo I think makes for a better online experience. Thanks again.
And remember… While I discovered Yahoo! 360 and its feeds features, I had hope Yahoo! will introcude lifestreaming. But not, they move all their straight on to blogging s*** features and never work on social part.
While I discovered main genius behind 360 “original” concept left Yahoo!… I understand I may build lifestream service myself :o|
I’m pretty sure the other initiative is still going strong inside of YHOO, so we’ll eventually be able to compare and see if it was worth holding the MBL version up for so long.
If it hadn’t been for MSFT’s takeover bid, I’m not even sure if the guys would have been able to launch now. There seems to be a certain desire to launch A LOT of things right now to show shareholders the company still has some juice in the takes.
The MBL team is the best I’ve ever worked with and they have an amazing ability to, when given a clear runway, launch new ideas every week or so. I think the MBL community will be pleasantly surprised over the next couple months.
Following up on the comments by Todd about how every social network will display lifestreams for their members with the key differentiator being how the data is made available for use by members.
BlogCatalog, like MyBlogLog, launched a social network aggregator on member’s profiles and has gone one step further towards portability by launching a universal public lifestream reader called your News Feed widget.
We’ve designed the News Feed widget to be a blogger’s “calling card†so that it’s easy for people to follow your Web activities. The News Feed displays your social activities from most major networks. It is network neutral and comes in a tight package.
We’ve tried to make it it even more valuable for bloggers by adding an RSS feed reader, so that you’re followers can easily receive updates. So far the response has been nothing short of incredible.
While we didn’t call it a beta, the News Feed widget will go through numerous iterations over the next few weeks and months including tying an analytics program to it.
If you have the opportunity to use it, please do, let us know what you think works and what doesn’t.
Nice one. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. My friends will enjoy reading it also.
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